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Top of the pile
95
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
97/100Critics
93/100Scholars
Author:
Kei Miller
Publisher:
Grove Press
Date:
September 15, 2021
Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics and more, Kei Miller recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice from a black, male, queer perspective. An almost disarmingly personal collection, Kei dissects his experiences in Jamaica and Britain, working as an artist and intellectual, making friends and lovers, discovering the possibilities of music and dance, literary criticism, culture, and storytelling.
What The Reviewers Say
Kei Miller’s Things I Have Withheld is a brilliant collection of fourteen essays on the topic of silence and what often goes left unsaid.
This book perfectly encapsulates what it means to live in today’s world as ‘the other’ as Miller takes the reader into the why of the withheld words, screams and protests. It is quickly apparent that Miller is a gifted writer; his silences furthering his craft as much as his words.
Kei Miller probes these silent places: what it means to be silent, to break that silence; what it means to risk one’s words and, in turn, the truth. Using his experience as a Black, Jamaican, queer man, he digs into the silence through letters to James Baldwin, Carnival, conversations with white writers, family secrets, and the experience of discrimination of the body and the histories and stories the body can tell.
Miller is reverent and forthright when summarizing the urgency he felt to address a specific subject in his most personal collection to date.
